Solomon’s stables boasted twelve thousand horses, and his huge court ate 185 bushels of flour a day.10 He was as powerful as any pharaoh. In fact, his kingdom now encompassed the Western Semitic province that had once belonged to Egypt, and Solomon even managed to marry an Egyptian princess; Egypt was long past the days when the pharaoh could sniff that daughters of the royal house did not travel out to other kingdoms.11 And Solomon expanded David’s connections with foreign countries. As well as dealing with Hiram of Tyre, he arranged to build his own ships at Byblos. He made marriage alliances with the far-flung Canaanite people that he could not conquer. He even received a delegation from Arabia: a delegation led by the most famous of ancient queens.
“WHEN THE QUEEN OF SHEBA heard about Solomon’s fame,” 1 Kings tells us, “she came to test his wisdom; she arrived with a caravan of spices, gold, and precious gems.”
The queen of Sheba is the first personality to struggle up out of the sandstorm covering the ancient history of the Arabian peninsula, and almost the only surviving face and name from the Arabia of very ancient times. Trade caravans were making their way to the Western Semitic kingdoms with greater frequency, and the queen of Sheba may have been leading such a caravan; she not only arrives with spices, gold, and gems, but leaves with “all she asked for, given to her out of the royal bounty.”12
Clearly, trade and manufacture, metalwork and weaving, had been going on around the edges of the Arabian peninsula for a very long time. The Mesopotamian kings, after all, had been travelling down from the head of the Gulf to the Copper Mountains of Magan, in southeast Arabia, two thousand years before. Farther north, the Arabian coast served as a staging post for ships making their way from Mesopotamia down to Indian ports; trading settlements here grew into cities.13
45.3 Arabia
We know even less about the southern corner of Arabia, since the ancient inscriptions that exist there cannot be dated with certainty. But it was most likely the Sabean kingdom of southern Arabia that sent a royal representative up to see Solomon. Trade between Israel and Arabia probably continued after her visit; an ancient altar from the area just west of the Jordan river is inscribed with Arabic letters.14 But all of the stories surrounding the enigmatic figure of the queen of Sheba, who may also be a queen of the Sabeans, are from much, much later; they tell us nothing at all about the Sabeans themselves.
SOLOMON’S EMPIRE-BUILDING carved a rift through his kingdom that eventually split it apart.
In order to build his temple and palace, Solomon conscripted thirty thousand Israelite men as laborers. These conscripted laborers were paid for their services, but had no choice; they had to spend one out of every three months working for the king. Meanwhile they were supposed to keep up with their own fields and vines. Each district was required to feed the enormous court (along with thousands of royal horses, cows, sheep, goats, deer, gazelles, and chickens) for one month out of the year. As the court grew, it took the districts longer and longer to pay their debt to the court. In some areas, the people worked almost half the year to meet their obligations to the king, and the other half year to support themselves.
The huge court grew, in part, because of Solomon’s tendency to make his political alliances by marriage; he had, according to his chronicler, seven hundred wives “of royal birth” who had been sent to him to seal alliances of various kinds. There is less excuse for the concubines, three hundred women with no political purpose whatsoever; the throng simply reflects Solomon’s enormous appetite.
His appetite for size, which turned Israel into a kingdom important enough for other potentates to visit from afar, also destroyed it. Solomon’s building programs ran him into tremendous debt, particularly to Hiram, the Phoenician king of Tyre. Lacking enough cash to pay off his shipments of cedar, pine, and gold, Solomon settled his account by giving Hiram “twenty towns in Galilee”15—a large section of the northern edge of his kingdom.
This was a no-win situation for everyone. Hiram, having gone to see the towns, nicknamed them “The Land of Good-for-Nothing.” And the north of Israel was furious. Solomon was a southern king, from the large and powerful southern tribe of Judah; as far as the cluster of little northern tribes was concerned, he had overbuilt, overtaxed, and overworked his people, and then tried to fix his troubles by giving away twenty northern towns while refusing to touch his own native land.
Revolt began under one of Solomon’s officials, a northern man named Jeroboam. When a prophet from Ephraim anointed Jeroboam king, Solomon got wind of the growing rebellion and sent out an assassination squad; Jeroboam fled down to Egypt and stayed there until old Solomon—who had now been on the throne forty years—died, leaving behind him a huge, rich, powerful, divided, and unhappy country.
Jeroboam returned, immediately, and organized a delegation to go to Solomon’s heir Rehoboam and ask for changes: lower taxes, less conscripted labor. Rehoboam, in turn, asked for advice from the double assembly that helped him govern, as it had helped kings from Gilgamesh on. The assembly of elders, cautious and experienced, advised him to reverse Solomon’s policies, to be less of a monarch and more of a shepherd; the assembly of young men told him to assert his power. “Tell them,” the young men advised, “that your little finger is thicker than your father’s penis.”
Rehoboam liked this advice, which perhaps reveals certain unresolved issues. When the delegates returned, Rehoboam made what may have been the most tactless political speech in history: “My father put a heavy yoke on you,” he told them, “but I will make it heavier.” The political results were immediate: the northern tribes, already unhappy, seceded and proclaimed their northern leader Jeroboam as king.
Only the tribe of Judah, the ancestral home of David himself, and the tiny neighboring tribe of Benjamin remained loyal to David’s grandson. The united kingdom of Israel had lasted barely two generations.
THE WEAKNESS of the kingdom did not go unnoticed by the Egyptians, who were experiencing a very brief renaissance.
Since the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period back around 1070, Egypt had been divided by civil war. The high priests of Amun, following the lead of Herihor, ruled from the southern city of Thebes, while the pharaohs of Dynasty 21 ruled the northern parts from the delta city of Tanis. The pharaohs at Tanis had the prestige of the royal bloodline, but the high priests had most of the money, thanks to the amount of land handed over to the Temple of Amun by previous pharaohs. Their wealth was so great that it echoed down into the Iliad: “The hell with him,” Achilles announces of Agamemnon, when he refuses to join the attack against Troy. “I loathe his presents,”
and for himself care not one straw.
He may offer me ten or even twenty times what he has…
he may promise me the wealth…of Egyptian Thebes,
which is the richest city in the whole world,
for it has a hundred gates through each of which two hundred men
may drive at once with their chariots and horses.16
The priests used some of this wealth to keep control of the south; they hired mercenaries from Libya to back up their authority. This Libyan “police force” was known as the Meshwesh.17 Around 950 or so, the “Great Chief of the Meshwesh” was a Libyan warrior named Sheshonq, with ambitions of his own. Although he headed up the armed forces of the north, he also managed to create an alliance with the south by marrying one of the daughters of the Tanis ruler Psusennes II, a pharaoh whose fourteen-year reign is almost completely obscure. When Psusennes II died, Sheshonq asserted his right, by marriage, to the throne of Egypt in Tanis. As Sheshonq had risen to prominence as the strong arm of the priests of Thebes, it did not take him long to assert his power over Egypt’s other capital as well.
The relative stability of this temporarily reunited Egypt can be seen by Sheshonq’s next action: he made a bid to recapture some of that land which had once belonged to Egypt, back in its glory days. And since Israel and Judah had now divided into weakened and quarrelling states, he set his e
yes on the Western Semitic lands.
He marched up the coast, through the weakened Philistines, and laid siege to Jerusalem itself. “In the fifth year of King Rehoboam,” 1 Kings says, “Sheshonq king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem. He carried off the treasures of the temple of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made. So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them.”18
Jerusalem’s walls remained intact, though. In other words, Rehoboam bought off his attacker with the temple treasure. Everything valuable but the Ark of the Covenant itself went to Egypt. In all likelihood, he was also forced to swear a vassal oath, becoming formally subject to the king of Egypt.
Sheshonq’s own reliefs tell us that he then marched farther north to subjugate the northern kingdom as well. Jeroboam, who had spent years hiding down in Egypt and waiting for Solomon’s assassination order to expire, now found himself on the wrong side of the people who had once given him refuge. He was dreadfully outnumbered; Sheshonq had managed to assemble twelve hundred chariots and sixty thousand soldiers, largely drawn from Libya and from Kush to the south.
Jeroboam fled, thus living to fight another day. Sheshonq pushed through Israel as far as Megiddo, and then stopped. He had reached the city conquered by Tuthmosis III half a millennium before; he had made his point, that under him Egypt had been renewed; and so he went back home. When he died, his descendants held the north and south together for some years.
Sheshonq’s invasion left a quivering and thoroughly demoralized divided kingdom behind him. For the next centuries, it would remain in two parts: the southern kingdom of Judah, under David’s descendants; and the northern kingdom known collectively as Israel, under an unstable shifting line of kings which turned over every two or three generations as a new charismatic warrior seized control of the royal house.
Chapter Forty-Six
From Western to Eastern Zhou
In China, between 918 and 771 BC,
trouble both inside and out
forces the Zhou king to move east
IN THE YEARS SINCE good King Wen’s grandson had sent his brothers out to establish Zhou centers of power, the outposts had grown and spread into small kingdoms. The men who now ruled them, descendants of those original royal siblings, were the second and third and fourth cousins of the monarch; a blood tie so distant as to be merely formal.1 The lands were now governed not by family relations, but by administrators (at best) and petty kings (at worst) who paid their dues of loyalty to the king not out of blood obligation, but out of duty.
Inevitably, the “Lords of the Nine Lands,” centered around the old colonies, acted with more and more independence. In the remains of their capital cities, archaeologists have uncovered bronze vessels cast and inscribed by the lords of the lands themselves; the Zhou emperor had lost his control over the bronze casting which had once been a royal monopoly.2 The inscriptions show that these same local governors were also beginning to celebrate their own feasts and rituals. They were not waiting for the king to act as the spokesman for heaven.
In response, the Zhou administration itself seems to have become slowly more and more structured, less dependent on personal loyalties, hedging its officials in with increasingly strict rules. Courtiers once simply called “lords,” who had carried out the general function of enforcing the king’s authority, now were awarded more specific titles: the Supervisor of the Land had one set of duties, the Supervisor of the Horse another set, the Supervisor of Works yet another. This growing bureaucracy, like the Mandate of Heaven itself, was intended to protect the king’s power; yet it simultaneously reduced it, spelling out the truth that he could not compel all-encompassing, heartfelt obedience simply through the force of his character.3
Soon, trouble between king and “lords” (called “dukes” in many translations) began to rear its head. Mu’s son Kung, according to Sima Qian, took a royal trip to visit the lord of a small state called Mi. The Duke of Mi had collected, for his harem, three beautiful girls from one family. Even his mother found this excessive: “A threesome of girls from one clan is too splendid a thing!” she scolded him. “Even a king does not consider himself deserving of this, much less should you, a petty lout!”
She suggested that he give the girls to the king instead. The duke refused, and King Kung apparently went home in peace. But a year later, he marched in and exterminated Mi.4 He was not going to allow any of the lords of his lands the chance to wallow in greater luxury than that of the king.
During the reign of his successor, King Yih, the king’s power was under threat from the outside as well. The Bamboo Annals tell us that barbarian tribes from outside the Zhou land mounted attacks on the capital itself. They had never accepted either Shang or Zhou rule, and did not intend to.5
The barbarians were beaten away, but the outside threat was compounded by treachery on the inside. Yih’s brother, Hsiao, managed to seize his throne. The accounts of the overthrow are vague, but the Bamboo Annals say that King Yih departed from his capital abruptly, while his brother Hsiao succeeded him rather than his son and living heir, Yi.
Yih died in exile; eventually the usurper Hsiao died as well, and Yi managed to recapture his throne with the help of a coalition of lords who (in Sima Qian’s words) “enthroned” him. But after this brief cooperation, he too had his difficulties with the lords of the lands. His particular bête noire turned out to be the Duke of Qi, up on the north Yellow river, which had grown into a stronger and stronger state in its own right. Bickering escalated to defiance; according to an inscription, Yi finally turned out the royal army and mounted a campaign against Qi. The Bamboo Annals add that he captured the Duke of Qi and boiled him in a bronze cauldron.6
Yi died the year after, and left the throne to his son Li. The quarrels between king and noblemen continued, and more than once erupted into actual fighting. Li, forced to battle constantly against challenges to his authority, grew more and more tyrannical. Sima Qian writes that his own people began to criticize him, and that in desperation the king ordered a Grand Inquisitor of sorts (a “shaman”) to go out and listen for disloyal speech. Culprits were arrested and executed. “The criticism subsided,” Sima Qian says, “but the feudal lords stopped coming to court…. The king became even more stern. No one in the capital dared to say a word, but only glanced at each other on the roads.”7
Misfortune soon joined the king’s repressive policies to make the people of China more miserable than ever: periods of famine and drought, punctuated by flooding rains, destroyed the harvests. An ode from Li’s reign laments the state of the kingdom:
Death rains and chaos from heaven down
swamping the king and throne,
worms gnaw thru root and joint of the grain,
woe to the Middle Land, murrain and mould.8
Other songs passed down from these years talk of hunger, discontent, and rebellion.9
The lords who were still loyal to the king warned Li that an explosion was coming: “To block people’s mouths is worse than blocking a river,” the Duke of Shao told his king. “When an obstructed river bursts its banks, it will surely hurt a great number of people.”10
Li, unconvinced, refused to recall his Grand Inquistor. Rebellion broke out; a mob gathered around the palace and shook the gates, but Li managed to get away, out of the capital and into the countryside. His young heir was less fortunate. Trapped in the city, the boy took refuge with his father’s faithful advisor, the Duke of Shao. To save the life of the heir to the throne, the Duke of Shao “replaced the Heir…with his own son.”11
Presumably the replacement “king” was killed; and the faithful advisor, who had sacrificed his own family for his king, raised the prince in his household. The rule of the Zhou kingdom passed into the hands of regents, until Li died in exile and the heir, King Hsuan, took the throne.
As far as Sima Qian is concerned, the cycle is progressing through its usual round. From Mu onwards, the Zhou rulers are b
ecoming slowly more decadent. In all likelihood, drought, famine, and the constant encroachments of the lords on royal power were more than enough to make the capital city an unhappy place; but Sima Qian finds it absolutely essential that Li be self-indulgent and cruel, and his son and heir Hsuan be headstrong and blind to the wise advice of his counselors.
Headstrong or not, Hsuan also faced a massive invasion of barbarians.
These invasions had become a constant annoyance. Across the northern and western mountain ranges, tribes of nomads ranged. They were probably Indo-European, and so unlike the descendants of those first Yellow river settlers; they lived a horse-oriented nomadic life, travelling across the high steppes on horseback, hunting game with bows. When they grew hungry, they came down to raid the fields and granaries of the Zhou farmers.
During Hsuan’s reign, the most threatening tribes were to the west.12 The Zhou called them “Xianyun,” which was probably not a tribal name; it was simply their designation for a coalition of different nomadic groups who had joined together to try to gain some of the Zhou prosperity for themselves.13
From the fifth to the twelfth year of his reign, the armies of King Hsuan marched out against the Xianyun, defending the center of his realm from those on the outside. They were a more troublesome tribe than the earlier invaders, in part because they used chariots in battle, and the wars against them dragged on and on. One of the poems from the Minor Odes (“Xianyun”) section of the Shi jing laments the invasion; a soldier posted on the frontier complains,
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 33
